The deeper I’ve aged into my 30s, the more focus I’ve placed on my health and on the richness of my life. And this past year, especially, it’s been very nice. I’ve also had a lot of abundance come my way: relational, psychological, financial, and otherwise. I feel better and more balanced than I have in a long time.

But recently, I’ve also found myself less interested in working on any of my hundreds of fiction ideas. Not even the dozen or so favorite ideas that I, at least, enjoyed turning around in my head. After doing some online research and talking to some writer friends about it, I’ve decided to put aside any and all pressure to write.

If I feel inspired to start a story (about whatever) tomorrow, I’ll lean into that. If I don’t want to write for the next year, that’s fine too. I’m sure I’ll find something else to do with my creative energy.

So What Am I Up To Now?

Mostly doing a lot of freelance work while reading and playing video games to relax.

At the moment, I’m having a good time getting back into hardcore web development and am super excited about some upcoming projects in that area. I’ve gotten involved with my local WordPress meetup as well. I can’t express how good it feels to genuinely enjoy doing something practical. It’s been a lifelong struggle to find anything practical that I enjoyed enough to pursue as a steady career, but I do think WordPress development is the thing.

I’m also spending a lot of time doing freelance content writing, which brings in great money and is pretty pleasant. I wouldn’t mind doing this for as long as it takes to earn a full-time living from web development.

Ideas for My Break

I’ll let my natural interests and inspiration run the show in terms of what I’ll do while I’m not working on any fiction projects, but I’m already pulled toward a few ideas:

1. Work on my writing craft: I have quite a few books and courses collecting dust that I’ve wanted to get to for years, but I felt like I needed to spend my time writing. I would love to focus on improving my craft again.
2. Start book blogging: I’ve been itching to start a book blog for some time, focused mostly on well-written dark erotic fiction. Basically my dream book blog.
3. More literary citizenship: I feel like I never have enough time to read and promote other authors’ work, so it would be nice to spend more time doing that—and it would complement book blogging well.
4. Do some outside-the-box fiction projects: Assuming I get the itch to create any creative work, it could be fun to simply play around, completely disregarding marketability: flash fiction, poetry, different genres, standalone scenes, whatever.
5. Make some fun graphics and covers: Just messing around with graphics and covers for my books could be fun and useful. I bought an Adobe alternative that I need to get used to, so I could do worse than redesign some book covers or create covers for stories I know I want to write down the line.

I’ll probably end up doing several of these ideas and maybe some other ones. Whatever I do, the main intention will be to have fun with something fiction-related and hopefully refill my creative well.